All DGX 2.0 contracts have therefore now been deployed onto the Kovan Testnet.

You may visit https://digixdev.com/marketplace/ for a trial of our soon to be launched Digix Marketplace as well. For those who already signed up for the demo previously, there are no significant changes apart from having the UI interface with the newly deployed contracts on Kovan.

What we are busy with until the launch of DGX 2.0 in Q1 2018?

End user and operational testing of Proof of Asset Protocol (PoA) and Marketplace

Digix is a hybrid company that has an operational team working on fulfilling the supply chain provenance (PoA protocol) on chain. This means that Digix operational employees will need to be fully educated on handling the UI / UX that interfaces with our DGX 2.0 smart contracts, and the logistics needed in fulfilling vendor orders and delivering the gold bars to the custodian.

Digix employees who are in charge of the real world operations of the Proof of Asset protocol have already begun testing the UI / UX interface which our vendors, custodians and auditors will be using in tracking the gold from vendor to custodial storage on the Ethereum public blockchain, and conducting mock dry runs on the full process from now till launch.

Any improvements in the UI /UX that will make it easy for our custodians or auditors to acknowledge their role in the PoA chain of custody is being sounded out and refined at the moment by our operations team.

DigixDAO

Plans for DigixDAO will be worked upon and detailed once we are fully confident with our PoA and UI/UX for the marketplace. We require DGX 2.0 to be production ready before embarking on the next phase in allowing DGD token holders to vote, manage, and disburse funds to projects that will grow the DGX ecosystem.

Team expansion and our new hire!

Rohit N.

We would like to welcome Rohit to the team. Rohit has two years of experience developing industry software. His research interests include GPU computing. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. He firmly believes in blockchain technology and dabbles on casino idea Dapps in his free time.

Addressing recent interests in Digix

On 6 February, the Digix team put out an FAQ post that was meant to acknowledge the recent interest and public coverage of Digix and DigixDAO by various online media publications and to address certain misperceptions that may have arisen from such public coverage.

In brief, Digix Gold (DGX) tokens and DigixDAO (DGD) tokens are two different native tokens of the Digix ecosystem.

DGX tokens represent physical gold bullion that are securely stored in our custodial vault on a 1:1 proportional basis, with 1 token backed by 1g of gold. The fee structure underlying all DGX transactions on the Ethereum blockchain feeds back into the Digix ecosystem through a rewards pool. More details about the process and the Proof of Asset protocol which underpins this can be found on our website, our Knowledgebase and our whitepaper.

DGD tokens on the other hand were created and distributed through our crowdsale in 2016, for the creation of a self-governing community that will help to grow the Digix ecosystem through a grant allocation and voting process.

As of now, DGX 2.0 is slated for release by end of Q1 2018 and details regarding the DAO governance structure will be released upon launch as well. We will provide our community with updates on the development process, so do follow us on our channels.

Digix hosts CryptoKitties visit in Singapore

The energy amongst the Ethereum Singapore community from the month of January has continued into February, with meetups having been scheduled for almost every week of February so far.

Last week, we saw the team behind CryptoKitties coming down from San Francisco to Singapore, presenting on their project to a full attendance.

Benny Giang — Founder of Cryptokitties

The enraptured crowd

Benny talks about digital art on the blockchain and digital collectibles such as digital pets, likening it to an evolution which began with the Tamagotchi as a significant starter.

Given the high profile nature of the project (surely everyone knows that CryptoKitties is infamous for congesting the Ethereum network some time back!), it was unsurprising that the presentation enraptured the audience.

More interestingly, Benny Giang talked about how the project started from their hackathon days and looking beyond CryptoKitties, the immense potential that the blockchain has in furthering what digital art symbolises to the community.

Shaun from Digix and Benny takes a joint photo as a shoutout to a long-time fan of both projects, Bitcoin_Louie!

Digix and Cryptokitties, perhaps something could be done together in the near future?

Meetups this week

This week, we have NewEra (NERA) Energy, a carbon credit certification protocol on the blockchain and Indorse, a decentralised professional social media network, presenting before the Lunar New Year starts this Friday.

To end off February, we will have aelf presenting on 27 February their decentralised cloud computing and multi-chain parallel processing system before we begin March in the same week with several other meetups scheduled.

We wish everyone a good Lunar New Year this week!

Any real-time community channels and lines that I can get access to, which are governed by the Official Digix Team?